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Posts: 10
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On hope
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Published: June 2, 2026 18:49
The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the future of humanity. All this in a post that I…
Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
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Published: May 28, 2026 04:36
As most readers have presumably heard by now, Paul Erdös’s Unit Distance Problem from 1946—one of the central open problems from the field of discrete geometry—has been solved by GPT5.5Pro. Erdös had conjectured that, given n points in the plane, at most…
No more NYT cooperation: my dog-rape red line
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Published: May 13, 2026 16:27
Over the years, I’ve written two op-eds for The New York Times about quantum computing, at the NYT editors’ invitation: Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Supermachines (2011) Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters (2019) …
The Trevisan Award and the Decimal Digits of Powers of 2
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Published: May 10, 2026 19:54
WHOA … I’ve won the inaugural Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science! This has a particular meaning for me as someone who knew Luca Trevisan as well as I did for 25 years — who had him as a professor and thesis committee…
Will you heed my warnings NOW?
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Published: April 29, 2026 08:11
Holy crap … yesterday I was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences! If you don’t believe me, click the link and keep scrolling down until you hit the name “Aaronson.” But then continue scrolling to see 144 other inductees, including my IAS…
Three greats who we’ve lost
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Published: April 19, 2026 06:30
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-2026) won the 1980 Turing Award for numerous contributions to computer science, including foundational work on concurrency and formal verification and the invention (with Dijkstra) of the dining philosophers problem.…
Before we start on quantum
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Published: April 7, 2026 07:51
Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them…
Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
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Published: April 1, 2026 21:26
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum fault-tolerance with lower overhead than was previously known, by…
Movie Review: "The AI Doc”
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Published: March 29, 2026 21:56
Yesterday Dana, the kids, and I went to the theater to watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, the well-reviewed new documentary about whether AGI will destroy the world. This was surely the weirdest family movie night we’ve ever done.…
My theoretical computer science notes from Epsilon Camp
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Published: March 29, 2026 05:17
Last summer, I was privileged to teach a two-week course on theoretical computer science to exceptional 11- and 12-year-olds at Epsilon Camp, held at Washington University in St. Louis. I was at Epsilon Camp to accompany my son Daniel, who attended a…